The Secret River (Kate Grenville)
Historical fiction. Hmmm. On the whole, I’m not keen. There’s something a little too loving about the way many authors treat the past, and research often weighs a book down. As it happens, I’m currently reading a book that was researched to death, Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet, which couldn’t be less weighed down if it tried. If that’s the standard (and it is), then Kate Grenville’s novel is not up to the mark.
Humour. Irony. Has the modern novel forgotten about its history? Novelists should be made to (re)read Fielding, Cervantes, Bulgakov, Thackeray, Rabelais and Gogol. Bulgakov wrote at the height of the Great Terror, and yet could find humour and irony. The Master and Margarita is perhaps the least serious novel of the 20th century, and yet it doesn’t suggest for a minute that the soviet regime was innocent. There is little or no humour here.
The Secret River is a very conventional novel that traces the development of William Thornhill from waterman on the Thames to the penal colony at New South Wales. The blurb tells us that Thornhill is ‘a man no better or worse than most’. Well, that sounds like a riot.
Once again there is a political undercurrent here, although it’s altogether more successfully executed than in Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Here we are forced to confront the moral dilemma of the colonist: how does he treat the indigenous people? This is far from a simple matter. Convicts were, after all, forced to be there and had a right to try to survive. Clearly the aboriginals had the right to be there too.
While this is an interesting question (and one the novel stays well away from providing an answer to), it doesn’t sustain the narrative well enough. The novel is broken up into very small sections, and this renders it episodic and disjointed. Ultimately we feel for William and his family, but there’s a rather disconcerting moral emptiness at the core of the book. Perhaps this is deliberate. Is it asking us: ‘what would you do?’
The Inheritance of Loss (Kiran Desai)
I hinted in my booker predictions that I wasn’t that fond of this novel. I suppose that’s partly because it’s so obviously a Booker novel that I find it all a little formulaic. There’s more than a hint of Rushdie and others have found echoes of Naipaul (although I’m not familiar with his work, so I’m not a reliable guide on that). Not that there’s anything wrong with being influenced by great novelists, of course.
There’s the classic picaresque Indian milieu (the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga) where a motley collection of misfits come to be divided by politics they don’t believe in or understand. A substantial portion of the book is set in the New York immigrant community, which are by far the weakest sections. The end is a the same time utterly predictable and silly.
The publishers are keen to tell us how much this is a novel to help us understand the lives of immigrants, and those ‘left behind’ and that’s noble and everything, but I find myself allergic to issue fiction. I remain impervious to David Hare’s argument in Obedience, Struggle and Revolt that political drama (or fiction) is somehow more valuable than ‘pure’ drama.
The novels I admire the most have very little, if anything, to do with politics. Of course, looking at how people are affected as the tide of history sweeps over them is certainly a worthy subject for fiction; one only has to think of the Prague sections of The Unbearable Lightness of Being to see that. Maybe this is just an attempt to do something similar that failed to resonate with me.
I think ultimately that I’m prejudiced against novels like this. I’m not keen on admitting that to myself, but there we are.
Book Backlog
I’ve been a very busy reader recently, but I’ve been less than disciplined in posting here. I promised reviews of the Booker nominees, and didn’t deliver. Since then, I’ve read the following books:
- Kingdom Come (J.G.Ballard)
- A Life’s Music (Andreï Makine)
- Travels in the Scriptorium (Paul Auster)
- The Berlin Wall (Frederick Taylor)
- April Fool’s Day (Josip Novakovich)
- The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins)
- Hotel Savoy (Joseph Roth)
- The Fugitive (Marcel Proust)
- House of Meetings (Martin Amis)
- A Sad Affair (Wolfgang Koeppen)
- Be Near Me (Andrew O’Hagan)
- Arlington Park (Rachel Cusk)
- Your Face Tomorrow – 2: Dance and Dream (Javier Marías)
- The Life of Hunger (Amélie Nothomb)
- Death in Danzig (Stefan Chwin)
I’ll tackle them one by one over the next few days. First, the long-awaited Booker reviews.
Booker Prize Predictions
I haven’t had time to write up my review of all the Booker contenders, and the winner is announced tonight. So, here are my predictions and my personal choice.
To put things in perspective, I thought that last year there were two outstanding novels (Banville’s The Sea, the winner, and A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry) and two very good ones (Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro and Arthur & George by Julian Barnes) on the shortlist. If any one of those novels were on the list this year they would be the runaway winner. It’s a very disappointing list this year.
That said, there are three books that I’m undecided between: Carry Me Down by M.J.Hyland, In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar and Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn. It’s very difficult to pick a winner out of those three. I keep wavering between them, but in the end I think I’m going to plump for Carry Me Down with Mother’s Milk a close second.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sarah Walters or Kiran Desai won.
But the really big question is: why isn’t Andrew O’Hagan’s Be Near Me on the list? That’s the best eligible novel I’ve read this year by a long distance.
Booker Prize Thoughts
Every year, there’s a different set of things to irritate book lovers in the Booker Prize Shortlist. This year, established names such as Peter Carey and David Mitchell have missed out in favour of relative unknowns. The only previously nominated author is Sarah Waters.
As with last year, I’m aiming to read all of the books on the shortlist. Last year my favourite of the nominees was John Banville’s The Sea which actually won the prize, although I had thought that Julian Barnes would finally get the nod for Arthur & George.
So far I have read all but Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn and the last 100 or so pages of The Secret River by Kate Grenville and it’s not easy to pick a winner. Personally, I didn’t think much of Waters’ The Night Watch and I stand by that judgement. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her win it, mind. The best novel, which is after all what the Booker is supposed to be about, is either Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland or In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar in my view.
Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss is a Rushiesque novel that is ultimately rather aimless and sentimental, even though it has moments of great beauty and pathos. It reminded me a lot of Rushie’s Shalimar the Clown, without any of the irritating bits. It’s exactly the kind of book that can win the Booker.
Once I’ve finished all the books, I’ll post my reviews, name my choice and prediction for the prize.
The Damned United (David Peace)
David Peace is the author of several Yorkshire-based novels, most notably the ‘Red Riding Quartet’, a sequence of novels about the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. He was chosen as one of the Granta ‘Best of Young British’ novelists in 2003.
The Damned United concerns Brian Clough‘s infamous 44 days in charge of Leeds United. As a kid I grew up hearing how great ‘Cloughie’, as he was universally known, was from my mother, inexplicably a Derby County and Nottingham Forest fan. What we’d today call a ‘glory chaser’. If a context in which the word ‘glory’ and those two clubs could now be used seems difficult to imagine, that’s more of a testimony to Cloughie’s genius than anything else. Both clubs were minnows before he became their manager, and both have returned to mediocrity since.
Derby County beat the Leeds of Don Revie, whose presence looms over this novel, to the league championship in the 1971-72 season and reached the semi-finals of the European Cup the next year. Something that Derby County fans, then resident at the Baseball Ground rather than the new base of Pride Park, can never expect to experience again without a seismic shift in the way that football works.
Clough was known as ‘Old Bighead’. And what a bighead he was! Quotes include: ‘I wouldn’t say I was the best manager, but I’m in the top 1′ and, on debating tactics: ‘ we sit down for ten minutes, have a chat, and agree that I was right in the first place’. Roy Keane, the recently appointed manager of Sunderland, who was signed by Clough at Forest, quoted his simple tactics: ‘pick up the ball, pass it to a red shirt and move’. It was good enough to win Forest the European Cup.
But despite his headstrong persona (which included him once punching a fan of my club, QPR), one always suspected that beneath everything was a deeply troubled man. His alcoholism cost him his job at Forest, and in later years, took its toll on him physically.
Peace’s novel seems to come as close as possible to getting inside Cloughie’s head. He intercuts scenes from his final match as a record-breaking striker for Sunderland and as a manager of Hartlepool (which Clough inexplicably refers to throughout as Hartlepools) with his brief tenure at Leeds.
The narrative treats the events at Elland Road (the Leeds ground then as now) as being in the present, while the time at Hartlepool and Derby are told as an interior monologue. Throughout the narrative, both before and during the Leeds episodes, Clough is obsessed with his nemesis Don Revie, his predecessor at Leeds. It is this obsession and the hatred of Leeds that it breeds that ultimately destroy Clough’s job at Leeds. His opening speech to the team is:
Gentlemen, I might as well tell you now, you lot may have won all the domestic honours there are and some of the European ones but, as far as I am concerned, the first thing you can do for me is to chuck all your medals and all your caps and all your pans into the biggest fucking dustbin you can find, because you’ve never won any of them fairly. You’ve done it all by bloody cheating.
As that extract shows, the book is full of footballer’s language, and is all the more entertaining for it. It is the first time I’ve seen the world of football adequately described fictionally, either on the page or the screen. This is a million miles away from a Kevin Costner baseball movie.
Ultimately, The Damned United is a book for people who know about and love football. And it’s pretty entertaining if you dislike Leeds United as much as the average football fan in this country (Elland road regulars and my mates GT and Ayaz notwithstanding).
While it’s not a great novel in my view, it is surely a better portrait of Cloughie than any biography could be, and it’s certainly an entertaining read. More to the point, it’s better than several of the books on this year’s Booker shortlist (reviews of all of them forthcoming). If you love football (the real football they used to play, not today’s Harlem Globetrotter variety) and are in the least interested in Brian Clough, you should read it.
The Innocent (Ian McEwan)
Every week in The Observer someone gets asked about their taste in books. One of the most interesting questions is: ‘Which living author is the most overrated?’. I’m never going to be interviewed by them, so I can reveal my answer here and now: it’s Ian McEwan.
It’s a total mystery to me why he is held in such high esteem in the UK. Is it because we’ve got nothing better to celebrate? Of living writers, there is Kazuo Ishiguro, John Banville (oh, alright, not from the UK) and Julian Barnes, to name only three, who tower over him. I find his style very aloof, pedestrian and pompous. His novel Saturday was one of the worst novels I’ve read recently.
The Innocent, according to the blurb on the back cover, ‘ensures McEwan’s major status’. I’m not really sure that that quote makes any sense at all. Whatever ‘major status’ might be, it’s not worth having, if this is what ensures it. It concerns a naive surveillance technician (Leonard Marnham) from Dollis Hill and his affair with a feisty young Berliner called Maria. The affair, the way it begins, the way it almost ends, everything about it are ridiculous. Initially, Leonard exhibits a painful lack of experience in bed, but within a few pages has turned into a domination freak.
Maria’s ex-husband Otto has a key part to play, and this really is the most ridiculous part of the entire story. McEwan is famous, if anything, for surgical accuracy. Here, his characters chop up Otto and wrap him in water-proof plastic, then haul him around Berlin in two boxes. And get away with it.
But the real curse of McEwan’s method is research. It’s the novelistic equivalent of putting the dreaded words ‘based on a true story’ at the start of a film. McEwan can’t help but tell you how thorough his research is, and he lays it all out for you in an afterword. But no amount of research can mask the leadenness of the writing. To judge from Saturday, written a full 15 years after The Innocent, not much has changed. The detail that he lavishes there on a squash game and, later, a brain operation are enough to make you want a lobotomy. And the conclusion in which a home invasion is foiled by quoting poetry is just risible.
The Innocent is a pretentious attempt to write a Berlin-based thriller, a sub-genre that I normally can’t get enough of. It looks down its nose at the ‘mere’ spy thriller, as though creative writing course trickery is somehow superior to storytelling. My advice? If you want a great Berlin-based spy thriller, look no further than Len Deighton’s wonderful Game, Set, Match trilogy. Don’t bother with The Innocent.
The Class (Hermann Ungar)
Hermann Ungar was completely unknown to me until I read a review of this translation, I think in the Guardian book review, and added it to my list of books to read. I’m glad I did.
Ungar belongs to the generation of novelists who wrote between the wars, in German. He was a German speaking Jew from Moravia, and so, unsurprisingly, attracts comparisons with Kafka.
Ungar’s concerns in this novel seem closely related to Kafka’s in his three (all unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime). The Class was published in 1927, a year before the author’s death, and two years after the publication of The Trial. I don’t know whether Ungar was aware of Kafka’s work, although one must suppose that he was, even in its bowdlerised form as it was then published.
The Class concerns Josef Blau, a school teacher from inauspicious origins who imagines himself to be persecuted by his class of young boys. There are some striking scenes of strange beauty, such as his fainting fit on a school outing after which he hides from a pupil, although it later transpires that the pupil had known where he was.
Blau’s jealousy of his fiancee is such that he believes her to be conducting an affair with his kindly colleague Herr Leopold, even though they have barely exchanged a word and she is pregnant with Blau’s child.
There is the grotesque Uncle Bobek, a drunkard, glutton and sponger who has formed an attachment to the fiancee’s mother with whom they all live. There is the sinister and unfathomable Modlizki who was a friend of Blau’s as a child but who has not benefited from the same social elevation. He is the eminence grise of the piece.
For those who love Kafka, and who can never hope to unearth any further masterpieces of his, however unfinished, fragmentary or otherwise flawed they may be, I recommend the work of Hermann Ungar: his novel The Maimed is somewhere on my never-ending list of future reading.
Doctor Glas (Hjalmar Söderberg)
Doctor Glas is written in the form of a diary, kept by the eponymous hero. Sometimes the entries are very short and to the point, sometimes rather more conventional narratives that seem, as one reads them, more like a carefully composed novel than a diary. Which is what it is, of course.
Glas is visited by the wife of a clergyman (Gregorius) who insists on exercising his spousal ‘rights’ rather too vigorously for her tastes. She’s having an affair with another man and is repulsed by her husband’s carnality, especially as it is wrapped up in some very dubious religiosity.
Glas becomes obsessed with Mrs. Gregorius and resolves to help her. The remainder of the novel deals with his crisis of conscience over this, and the far worse deeds that he contemplates.
There are wonderful interludes as Glas muses to his diary about matters of philosophical interest; these are some of the most interesting passages in the novel.
While this is a slight novel, it has a character all its own. Although clearly related to the work of Knut Hamsun, Söderberg’s countryman and contemporary, it still has its own tone and aesthetic.
The publishing industry, suffering as it is under the weight of finding the next J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown, has unearthed a number of small masterpieces such as this in recent years. Harvill, Granta, Dedalus and the rest are to be congratulated that they can find a market for such interesting and characterful fiction among the dross. Long may they continue to unearth such gems.
